See Xenia Package

I've been working to develop a standard relational table reference schema for observation system aggregation and product development. Be glad to compare notes with others doing relational schema development as to what works. I'm trying to keep the schema more modular so folks can add or take away components depending on the end products they want to support.

With this kind of development, the table schema represents the format and the data dictionaries are support/lookup tables.

If the database and derived web services/xml records/products become more packaged, then hopefully the job shifts more towards getting messy data into a 'standard' database that provides a minimum set of agreed community web services and records. Redundancy in data sources can provide a failover capacity. Data could be replicated via mirroring for copied implementations or web services where implementations are different.

Jeremy